11/20/25 Jon Lane: Children’s Acquisition and Detection of Social Biases
CCN brown bag
Jonathan Lane, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychology and Human Development
Date: Thursday, November 20th, 2025
Time: 12:10-1:00pm
Location: Wilson Hall 316
Children’s Acquisition and Detection of Social Biases
We are all susceptible to acquiring social biases, and we often identify social biases in others. Our lab has been exploring the developmental origins of these phenomena. In the first portion of my talk, I focus on children’s acquisition of social biases. I present our lab’s studies of how children’s attitudes towards novel social groups are influenced by their exposure to denigrating claims about those groups—claims that are uttered either directly to children or which children overhear. The second portion of my talk is focused on children’s detection of others’ group-based social biases. I describe our studies examining how children interpret the behavior of people who consistently treat members of different social groups in different ways. Through this work we identify, among other things, developmental trajectories in how quickly and how often children infer that unequal group treatment reflects persons’ underlying social biases against particular groups.